For 30 years, the photographic work of Lynne Cohen has developed in a radical way through images of spaces of quasi-fictional appearance, where human presence is made manifest by its absence.
Rather, human presence is implied by our recognition of common objects and, above all, because it is known that all those spaces exist and are in use.
These interiors are not a figment of the artist’s imagination ; they are found places.
The work of Lynne Cohen voluntarily plays within the ambiguity between ready-made and installation, between the found place and the set-up.
After her first works of a very kitsch aesthetics, and since the 1980’s, Lynne Cohen orchestrates a typology of place which has become emblematic of her work : class rooms, work places, leisure spaces, rooms for military training, police schools, spas, laboratories, libraries… places to which we usually give little attention to. By isolating those places and by setting these spaces within her photographic negative, Lynne Cohen reconfigures that familiar terrain to transform it into a work of art; thus, the known terrain becomes strange to us, indeed alien.
In 1998 Lynne Cohen that had always resisted the use of colour, decides to use it in order to put in evidence its synthetic and chemical nature, as well as the properties that render it more unnatural such as plywood, aluminium, or polystyrene.
Lynne Cohen’s training as a sculptor is evident in the monumental quality of the objects and the places that she chooses and in the precise rendition of the textures of materials.
She underlines this sculptural dimension by exhibiting her prints framed in Formica, which reinforces the object quality of the images.
